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Saturday, March 29, 2014

One
of the perils of Paradise is an insect bite. Here in Vieques we have the usual
suspects that are common to the North – mosquitoes, bees and wasps, spiders.
But in the tropics we have some big-time chompers – tarantulas, scorpions and
the fleet-footed Puerto Rican centipede that can approach a foot in length.

I have adverse reactions to stings and bites. On my fair Ukrainian skin, a mosquito bite welts… a fire ant’s acid attack can blister and itch for a week.

So
when the big toe of my right foot began to swell and throb recently, my first
thought was insect bite.

But
instead of dissipating after a day or two, the swelling increased and the pain
worsened.

Now,
my wife’s sister is a registered nurse. My wife believes that the tight DNA connection between siblings gives her as much right to dispense
medical advice as her sister.

“Soak
your foot in water as hot as you can take, and it will draw out the poison,” my wife ordered as she poured boiling water into the bucket we use to mop floors.

By
the second day of this medieval torture (in addition to the painful toe, my
entire foot was now scalded), I made an executive decision that this was no
insect bite.

I couldn’t bend my toe at all, and pressing it down against the floor caused stabbing pain.

It was Sunday, and the thought of seeking medical help the next day plunged me into deep depression.

Like
a miracle, however, Monday morning brought improvement in the toe. Yay! It’s
not a broken bone. No emergency room!

That
evening, we went out to dinner with our neighbors – who both happen to be retired doctors.

In
the car, I mentioned my toe trouble – as casual chit-chat, not as a try for
free medical advice.

Suddenly
the two doctors morphed. They were two kids drawn to my troubled toe as if it were
a piece of candy.

Mr.
Doctor, a pediatric urology surgeon, said, “Could be gout.”

I
laughed. I knew gout to be the “disease of kings" or "rich man's
disease."

Mrs.
Doctor, an anesthesiologist, agreed with her husband and recommended I spray Benadryl
on the toe.

Mr.
Doctor challenged his wife: “Really? Do you think topical application would
have value?”

So
there I was, enjoying a toe consult by two prominent medicos … in the car … on
a dark Vieques road.

“I’ll
come over in the morning to look at your toe,” Mrs. Doctor offered.

But in the morning, it was her husband who sneaked over to our house and made me show my toe.

Gout
is a recurring ailment, so in an effort to forestall future flare-ups, I turned
to the Internet for information. Here’s what I learned.

Gout’s
been around forever. Hippocrates in 400 B. C. wrote about it -- noting its
absence in eunuchs and premenopausal women.

Gout
is acute inflammatory arthritis resulting in a red, tender, swollen joint. The joint
at the base of the big toe is affected in half the cases. The elevated level of
uric acid in the blood that causes gout is also responsible for kidney stones.

Causes
of the condition include the usual caloric culprits: not enough vitamin C,too much meat and seafood, overdoing alcohol and fructose -- and obesity.

In
1683, an English physician posited yet another cause:

“Gouty patients are,
generally, either old men, or men who have so worn themselves out in youth as
to have brought on premature old age -- of such dissolute habits none being
more common than excessive indulgence in venery.”

If
you have to look up the definition of venery, you obviously haven’t lived
enough.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

The film was shot in locations around the world on a
budget of $50,000.

When it opened in 1964, it played for an entire year in New York City.

The movie’s poster became part of the Design Collection at New
York’s Museum Of Modern Art.

More than $30 million gross later, “The Endless
Summer” is a classic.

The
film is a simple documentary that follows two young surfers around the world in
search of the perfect wave -- chasing the sun in a quest for perpetual summer.

Now,
50 years later, as one vacation season ends at Casa Cascadas in Vieques and another begins at The Sandpiper on Cape Cod, I ask why. Why are we so compelled as a
species to seek sun, sand and surf?

Perhaps
it’s because we image perpetual summer in both Eden, our first home, and in Paradise,
our last.

But journeying to tropical climates is only part of the story.International tourism surpassed the billion-person mark in 2012 … reached a
record 1.87 billion last year, … and is forecast to grow more than four percent during 2014. By a wide margin, France is the most visited country on the planet -- hardly a tropical destination.

For a possible answer, I
have to look back 2,300 years to Aristotle’s definition of happiness.

Aristotle,
384-322 B. C.

The philosopher enshrined happiness as the ultimate purpose of human
existence.

We
desire travel, vacation, leisure – you name it -- because we believe that these will make us happy.

Happiness
is often conceived of as a subjective state of mind, as when we say we’re happy
when we are enjoying a cold drink on a hot day, or when we get a promotion or a
raise, or when our love is reciprocated.

For
Aristotle, however, happiness is always an end in itself.It is not something that can be gained or lost in a
few hours, like pleasurable sensations. Instead, it encompasses the totality of one’s life.“One swallow does not make a summer,
nor does one day,” he says.

Happiness is the ultimate value of our life, a measure of how well we have lived up to our full potential.

Happiness,
in other words, cannot be achieved until the end of one’s life. It is a goal that continuously recedes before our grasp – like
the horizon.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Shirley, a woman of a certain
age, has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital, where she has a
near-death experience and sees God.

She asks, “Is this it?”

“No,” God says. “You have another
30 years to live.”

Shirley figures that since she
has so much time left, she may as well make the most of it. So she stays in the
hospital and has a face-lift, a tummy tuck, breast enhancement – the works.

When she’s on her feet again, she leaves the hospital, starts to cross the street and is hit by an ambulance
speeding to the emergency room entrance.

She arrives in Paradise and says
to God, “I thought you said I had another 30 years?”

God takes a long, hard look at
her and says, “Shirley, is that you? I didn’t recognize you!”

My daughter, Julie,
suffers from a disorder few have heard of: face blindness.

The medical name is prosopagnosia.
From the Greek prosopon, for face,
and agnosia, for ignorance.

Prosopagnosics have difficulty
recognizing people they’ve met in the past. Some can’t recognize their spouses
and children. Some can’t even recognize themselves in a mirror.

When Julie worked as a
background actor, she says, “I’d meet people in the morning and get friendly
with them while shooting a scene. Then there would be a costume change….”

Julie couldn’t recognize other actors after a costume change.

And as a sales associate
at an upscale retail outlet: “There was a customer I would spend hours with and
she’d always spend a lot of money. But I never recognized her until I saw her
credit card.”

Most prosopagnosics
learn to distinguish people based on hairstyle, voice or body shape. Or they
pretend to be lost in thought. Or they act friendly to everyone -- or to no
one.

But some are unaware of
their disorder -- because they’ve never recognized faces normally. Like my
daughter, they don’t discover their face blindness until adulthood.

Because of
this, they may be misjudged as uppity.

Brad Pitt is one of
these. The condition has caused him enough of a headache that he doesn't like
going out.

"That's why I stay
at home," he says. "You meet so many damned people. And then you meet
'em again."Jane Goodall, famous for
her pioneering studies of chimpanzees, suffers from prosopagnosia. For all we
know, old Jane might have thought -- all those lonely years in the jungle -- that
she was observing kangaroos.

Prosopagnosic Jane Goodall.

One person in 50 has the
disorder. Not so rare at all. No therapies have demonstrated lasting
improvements.

The condition is likely caused
by a defect in a dominant gene. So if a parent has prosopagnosia, there’s a
50-50 chance the child has it.

If my daughter is a
prosopagnosic, I might be the cause.

So many times, for
instance, I’ve run into “strangers” who greet me by name … and I think, “I’ve
never seen that person in my life.”

I have to ask myself …
am I face blind? Or just too self-absorbed to notice anyone else?

I often forget a
person’s name as soon as I’m introduced.

Again, I have to ask
myself … is it prosopagnosia? Or am I playing a multiple-choice game of
wondering if the person I’m introduced to:

a)
Likes me

b)
Is impressed with me

c)
Envies me

d)
Lusts after me

I hope my condition is
just the forgetfulness that comes with advancing age. Otherwise I’ll have to learn
to spell prosopagnosia. And say it, too.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

“You use the word ‘amazing’ to
describe a goddamn sandwich at Wendy’s? What’s going to happen on your wedding
day, or when your first child is born? How will you describe it? You already
wasted ‘amazing’ on a fucking sandwich.”

Louis C. K.

How do
you describe paradise?

All St.
Paul could say was: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard …”

But when
visitors to my Vieques B&B first look out at the expanse of Caribbean Sea
before them, it might as well be a sandwich: Amazing! … Awesome!I hate
to sound like a whiner, but the overuse of amazing
and awesome is making me mad as
hell.

“I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Huffington Post Blogger Phillip Goldberg points
out that the song "Amazing Grace" works because its composer
experienced a transcendent experience. “Amazin' Mets” was an appropriate
nickname because the original team was shockingly awful and because the 1969
squad stunned the world by winning the World Series.

But
Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is not amazing
-- even though its commercials say it is.

What bothers me most? Amazing and awesome are
indiscriminately applied by people who should know better – advertising copywriters.

These
are the people who are supposed to understand that if everything is amazing, then nothing is amazing.

These
are the people who are supposed to know that the root word, awe, carries connotations of fear and
dread.

Advertising Age, the industry’s version of Variety, printed this headline:

“Can BBDO Make Bud Light
Advertising Awesome Again?”

And venerable old Readers Digest:

“13+ Amazing Uses for WD-40”

All of
it cannot be amazing. All cannot be awesome. Instead, it’s all become nonsense.

But there’s
nothing, really, that I can do about it beyond begging you, as Peter Finch did
in the 1976 movie, Network, to “get
up right now, go to your windows and stick your head out and yell 'I'm as mad
as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!’”